Dell Inspiron 14R

Dell’s update to its venerable Inspiron line has a new look and plenty of power. Aimed at the back-to-school crowd, the 14-inch Inspiron 14R includes hardware features and software meant to appeal to students (and their parents). This $819 configuration also includes ATI graphics, so users can game on the side at an affordable price. However, while this machine is a strong performer, it sacrifices battery life.

Design

The Inspiron 14R looks modern. Though its surfaces are made of plastic, the internal chassis is made of magnesium alloy, which gives the notebook a sturdy frame, but also results in a 5-pound system that’s a bit heavier than the 14-inch competition. For example, the Lenovo IdeaPad V460 weighs 4.8 pounds, and the HP Pavilion dm4 weighs just 4.4 pounds. Still, the 13.5 x 9.7 x 1.3-inch system looks fairly sleek, complete with rounded edges and tapered sides. Dell’s hinge-forward design, similar to that of its updated Inspiron Mini netbooks, makes the back bulkier but allows for extra battery space.

The glossy lid shows off the notebook’s color—a metallic Peacock Blue, a $40 premium—but collects fingerprints like a crime scene (other colors aside from the standard black are Tomato Red and Promise Pink). This also goes for the bezel around the glossy display under the lid, though thankfully the deck—plastic painted to look like brushed metal—has a smudge-resistant coating. Dell didn’t clutter the deck with many lights or buttons, settling for a white, glowing power button on the upper left and three small lights on the bottom left.

Heat

To test temperatures, we played Hulu at full screen for 15 minutes, then measured the space between the G and H keys (97 degrees Fahrenheit), touchpad (101 degrees), and the center of the bottom (101 degrees). When using the Inspiron 14R in our lap we noticed that the system became uncomfortably hot on the left side near the vent, which reached 106 degrees.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The full-size keyboard features comfortable, terraced keys that offered good tactile feedback and response. We were able to reach our normal typing speed immediately, and none of the keys were undersized or in weird places, so it was also easy to execute keyboard shortcuts.

We appreciated the generous, 3.8 x 2-inch touchpad with discrete left and right mouse buttons. Though it’s multitouch-enabled, the touch surface wasn’t overly sensitive as we’ve seen on some other Dell systems. At first we found the sensitivity too low; two-finger scrolling took more precision than we expected, and it took a few hours to get used to. The Synaptics driver offers settings and tweaks (go to Control Panel > Mouse) for the multitouch gestures and a sensitivity slider to make adjustments.

Performance

The 2.27-GHz Intel Core i3-350M CPU and 4GB of RAM earned the Inspiron 14R a score of 4,773 in PCMark Vantage. Comfortably above the thin and light average (4,033), it also outscored the last generation Core i3-powered Inspiron 14 (4,248), the Lenovo ThinkPad L412 (4,167), and the latest Core 2 Duo MacBook (4,259). However, the 14R couldn’t keep up with the 13.3-inch Asus U30Jc (5,334), which has Core i3-350M power and discrete Nvidia graphics, or the similarly priced 14-inch HP Pavilion dm4 with a Core i5 CPU (5,983).

Transcoding a 114MB MPEG-4 video file to AVI format using Oxelon Media Encoder took 1 minute and 6 seconds, just 3 seconds longer than the average thin-and-light notebook. We were disappointed that the 5,400-rpm, 500GB hard drive took a full 1 minute and 28 seconds to boot into Windows 7 Home Premium—the average is just 56 seconds.

The Inspiron 14R only managed a 23.1-MBps transfer rate in our testing, which is a hair below the category average (23.4 MBps) and well behind both the Pavilion dm4 (30.3 MBps) and the MacBook (30.1 MBps in Snow Leopard). Still, it’s faster than the ThinkPad L412 and U30Jc (20.9 MBps).

Graphics

The last-generation Inspiron 14 only offered discrete graphics when paired with a Core i5 CPU, but this time around you can get a 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 card with a Core i3 processor. This GPU notched a score of 3,848 on 3DMark06; that’s more than 1,000 points above the average thin-and-light (2,126) and more than 100 points above the U30Jc with an Nvidia GT 310M GPU (3,711). The Inspiron 14R’s only competition here is the MacBook, whose Nvidia GeForce 320M GPU notched 4,778. While testing this system we did note some pixelation in both standard-def and HD video, but otherwise playback was smooth and image quality good.

In World of Warcraft we measured 78 frames per second while playing in the auto resolution (1024 x 768); this dropped to a slow but playable 29 fps when we upped the resolution and graphics to the max. Both the MacBook (128/50 fps) and the U30Jc (146/34 fps) offer much faster gameplay. On the other hand, the Inspiron 14R blows away systems with Intel’s integrated graphics like the Pavilion dm4 (61/10 fps) and the ThinkPad L412 (52/9 fps). In Far Cry 2, the Inspiron 14R managed 40 fps in the lower resolution and 13 at the max. Not surprisingly, Facebook games like Pet Society and Bejeweled Blitz were both speedy and crisply rendered.

Verdict

The $819 Dell Inspiron 14R is a good choice for students and other consumers looking for strong performance in an attractive, comfortable design. However, if you care about battery life you might want to either opt for a model with integrated graphics or get the nine-cell battery. If you don’t mind a smaller 13-inch display—and spending a little extra cash—we prefer the Asus U30Jc, which lasts more than twice as long on a charge and offers comparable graphics power.